Out in the Open: The Men Supercharging Neuroscience With Open Source Hardware

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Out in the Open: The Men Supercharging Neuroscience With Open Source Hardware

The flexDrive, a brain-monitoring implant shared through the Open Ephys project.

Image: Open Ephys

Today's neuroscientists need expertise in more than just the human brain. They must also be accomplished hardware engineers, capable of building new tools for analyzing the brain and collecting data from it.

There are many off-the-shelf commercial instruments that help you do such things, but they're usually expensive and hard to customize, says Josh Siegle, a doctoral student at the Wilson Lab at MIT. "Neuroscience tends to have a pretty hacker-oriented culture," he says. "A lot of people have a very specific idea of how an experiment needs to be done, so they build their own tools."

The problem, Siegle says, is that few neuroscientists share the tools they build. And because they're so focused on creating tools for their specific experiments, he says, researchers don't often consider design principles like modularity, which would allow them to reuse tools in other experiments. That can mean too much redundant work as researchers spend time solving problems others already have solved, and building things from scratch instead of repurposing old tools.

>'We just want to build awareness of how open source eliminates redundancy, reduces costs, and increases productivity'

That's why Siegle and Jakob Voigts of the Moore Lab at Brown University founded Open Ephys, a project for sharing open source neuroscience hardware designs. They started by posting designs for the tools they use to record electrical signals in the brain. They hope to kick start an open source movement within neuroscience by making their designs public, and encouraging others to do the same. "We don't necessarily want people to use our tools specifically," Siegle says. "We just want to build awareness of how open source eliminates redundancy, reduces costs, and increases productivity."

The project started three years ago as part of their research on hippocampus and cortex activity in mice. "We spent about half a year looking for the perfect commercial data acquisition tool to use for our experiment recording electrical signals from brains," Siegle says. "We looked at all of the commercial systems and all of them were inadequate in some way."

Rather than cobble together yet another tool that would end up gathering dust in a lab, they took a more modular approach. And they shared the creation process online so they could gather feedback from the broader neuroscience community. "If someone else was working on something similar we wanted to collaborate," he says. They also wanted their tools to be customizable, so that other scientists could easily modify them for their own purposes.

Open Ephys co-founders Joshua Siegle (left) and Jakob Voigts (right).

The first Open Ephys projects include components for recording electrical signals in mice brains, and a software interface for collecting data. Unlike something along the lines of the open source brain scanning tool Open BCI, the Open Ephys tools are aimed at neuroscience researchers, not at engineers and game developers. Nonetheless, in building these contraptions, Siegle and Voigts have turned to many of the same tools used by other hardware hackers across the country, including the Arduino open source circuit board. "We like Arduinos because lots of people know how to use them, and they're easy to get your hands on," Siegle says.

Availability of components is key because, for now, if you want an Open Ephys tool, you'll have to build it yourself. Siegle says that should change soon. The team is planning an online store where they'll sell kits and components. Meanwhile, they've given 50 units to various research labs, and they plan to give 100 more thanks to a donation from Texas Instruments. Getting the tools into more hands means more outside contributions, and an overall more robust product.

But most importantly, they hope to use the site to highlight projects from other neuroscientists and encourage more researchers to open source their work. They hope that by opening up the process of building tools, researchers can spend more time on what attracted them to the field in the first place: science.